Hi again. Sorry Steven for not replying to your last email. This time, I have tried something different and it worked! I basically rebuild program_options with _SECURE_SCL and _HAS_ITERATOR_DEBUGGING enabled. Can you double check whether or not you have these two symbols enabled? My program options are a simple "--input=ddd". I have tried the test program ( see below ) on a different machine and it blows up too. Regards, Christian #include <iostream> #include <boost/program_options.hpp> using namespace std; namespace po = boost::program_options; int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { string input; po::options_description desc("Allowed options"); desc.add_options() ( "help,h" , "produce help message" ) ( "input" , po::value<string>( &input ), "Input File" ); po::variables_map vm; po::store( po::parse_command_line(argc, argv, desc), vm ); po::notify( vm ); if( vm.count( "help" )) { cout << desc << endl; return 1; } }